


Becoming Pepper

by AGoatAteMyNameTag



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: 2000s, Gen, Humor, Origin Story, Pre-Iron Man 1, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25072651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AGoatAteMyNameTag/pseuds/AGoatAteMyNameTag
Summary: According to the Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki: "Due to a misunderstanding however, a bodyguard ended up spraying Potts in the face with pepper spray when she tried to enter the CEO's office, prompting Stark to give her the nickname 'Pepper'."This is that story.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Becoming Pepper

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in 1999. Cell phones are not ubiquitous, TMZ doesn't exist and VHS tapes have just given way to DVDs. More importantly to this story, Tony is 29 and nowhere near becoming Iron Man. Pepper isn't even Pepper yet (hence, this story).

Virginia had tried everything.

She had gone to her immediate supervisor last week about this and first he had brushed her off, saying that it couldn’t possibly be wrong since the CEO himself, Tony Stark had approved these figures. She had then walked him through the process of how she found the error, thus proving that the numbers were wrong and that even wunderkind Tony Stark could make a mistake.Her supervisor had said he would look into it.   
  
She gave him Friday and the weekend to do so.  
  
Monday morning, she e-mailed her supervisor for an update and received no response. She tried hanging around his office to catch him but as lunchtime came and went, she got the sneaking suspicion that she was being avoided. The deal was going to close on Friday and if this wasn’t fixed by then, it would cause a cascade of errors that would end up costing Stark Industries millions of dollars and probably launch at least one investigation into their handling of government contracts.   
  
On Tuesday she contacted her division supervisor and received no response. She asked around and discovered that she was on vacation this week.   
  
On Wednesday she contacted both the Controller and the Vice President of Finance. The Controller told her to report it to her immediate supervisor and the VP never gave her a response.   
  
Which brought her to now, Thursday morning. Virginia was sitting at her desk in her cubicle, staring at the stack of documents she intended to take to Tony Stark himself.  
  
As soon as she could get over her nerves about it.   
  
Because really, who was she to go right up to her boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss and tell him that he was wrong? He, who just happened to be Tony Stark, child prodigy and engineering genius. People who graduated from MIT’s School of Engineering _summa cum laude_ , at 17 no less, were generally not bad at handling numbers. They were well-organized, detail-oriented, and thoroughly diligent in their work. They had to be in order to survive the rigors of one of the best engineering schools in the entire world.  
  
Right?  
  
But yet, the mistake was there, detailed in the pile of papers sitting on her desk. And as much as Tony Stark supposedly thought of himself as god, he wasn’t. He was human. Which made him capable of mistakes.  
  
Virginia looked up at the wall clock that she could see from her cubicle. 10:09 am.   
  
The red second hand ticked down each second she was losing by sitting here at her desk.   
  
With a nod to herself, she gathered her documents and headed towards the elevators.   
  


* * *

  
Upon exiting the elevator on the top floor of the Stark Industries building, Virginia was faced with a choice. To the right were conference rooms and other meeting spaces for the Board of Directors. To the left was the Office of the CEO. She went left and continued down a short hallway until she was met with a frosted glass door that had ‘Anthony Stark, CEO’ emblazoned across it. She pushed through the door as was met with a tastefully decorated waiting room. On the far side was a desk at which a husky looking man was sat, dressed in a suit and tie. The name plate on the desk simply said ‘Receptionist’. Virginia had the feeling that this man was not, in fact, a receptionist.   
  
“Can I help you?” he said, standing.   
  
“Uh, yes, I’m Virginia Potts,” she said, moving closer to stand in front of the desk. “I’m from Finance, I have a meeting with Mr. Stark.” She didn’t, but going through the proper channels had gotten her nothing so far.  
  
The man, Harold Hogan from what she could see on his ID badge, peered at her skeptically before paging through a planner that was left open on the desk. From the way he flipped the pages back and forth and then back again, she could tell he had no idea what was in front of him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stark doesn’t have any meetings on the schedule for today.”  
  
 _Liar_. “I know, but I just got off the phone with him—”   
  
“I didn’t hear Ton-uh-Mr. Stark take any phone calls just now.” Hogan narrowed his eyes at her. “Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”   
  
“No, you don’t understand, I really need to speak with—”   
  
“I’m sure you do,” Hogan moved out from behind the desk and began crowding into Virginia’s personal space to shepherd her back towards the door she had just come through. “But Mr. Stark has made it very clear that he’s not to be interrupted while in the office today.”

Virginia frowned. She was getting really sick and tired of being ignored. She stopped stepping backwards and stood her ground. “Look, I have to meet with Mr. Stark. It’s about an extremely urgent matter that if it doesn’t get resolved today, it will literally cost this company millions of dollars.”   
  
Understanding appeared to dawn on Hogan’s face. “Ah, I see.” He began motioning her to keep heading back towards the entrance door and the elevators. “Mr. Stark will only speak to this matter with a representative from HR present. Until such a meeting can be arranged, he requests that you send all correspondence through a mediator—”   
  
Oh. Oh no. He didn’t….did he really think she was here as some sort of sexual harassment issue? Wonderful. Virginia really thought she had left this behind at A.I.M. “Listen, Rent-a Cop! I need to meet with Tony Stark, and you’re not going to stop me. I don’t care if he has the entirety of the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleading Squad in there with him, he needs to see this!” Virginia shouldered her way past Hogan but only made it a step before a hand closed around her bicep and forcefully turned her around. She opened her mouth to yell at him some more but only saw some sort of whitish mist being sprayed at her.   
  
Then the burning started.   
  
Virginia wasn’t proud of it but she screamed. Papers all but forgotten, she dropped to her knees wiping furiously at her eyes. What had Hogan done to her? Her entire face felt like it was on fire. And being stabbed by millions of tiny little ants. She gasped for air but that was a mistake as she felt whatever it was coat her tongue and go down her throat, burning, burning, burning. Was she dying? Were her eyes melting out of her head? Was she going to be blind?   
  
“Jesus Christ Happy, what did you do?!”   
  
“She—” Hogan sputtered, apparently also choking on whatever he had sprayed at Virginia. “She was going to—”   
  
“What, attack me?” Tony coughed a bit himself, and his next words sounded strangely muffled. “She probably weighs 125 pounds soaking wet!...God, it’s going to smell like the Mexican Restaurant from Hell in here for weeks!”   
  
Oh no. This could not be how she was going to meet Tony Stark. Face covered in pepper spray, tears and drool streaming freely down her face and off her chin while she coughed and gasped for air so hard she was dangerously close to losing her breakfast. Well, at least she’d have a story to tell at the bar while she waited for her unemployment checks.  
  
A hand landed on her shoulder and she flinched away from it. “Hey, uh, just me. Tony Stark, by the way. I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of meeting. What’s your name?”  
  
She managed to choke out “Virgin” before coughing again.   
  
“…Ok that can’t be it. I’m going to call you Pepper Spray until we can get you sorted out and you can tell me your real name. Happy, do you have an, I don’t know, antidote for this?”   
  
“They make an antidote for pepper spray?”   
  
She heard Tony mutter “oh for fuck’s sake” under his breath. “Pepper Spray I’m going to help you up to the bathroom that’s just a few steps away, alright? And if you’re gonna hurl, aim to your left because I’m going to be on your right and puke is really hard to get out of Berluti’s. Believe me, I would know.”   
  
She felt an arm go around her waist and another grab her hand and pull her up off the floor. She stumbled about twelve or so steps until she heard a door being pushed open and a light switch being flicked on. A few more steps and she felt a counter against her hip and heard a faucet being turned on. She reached forward and felt cool water flowing over her fingertips. She began enthusiastically splashing water on her face and in her eyes, trying her damnedest to open them to no avail. She could feel her blazer and shirt becoming soaked with the water she was splashing on herself but she didn’t care. The sweet relief, however minor, that the water brought to her burning face and eyes and mouth was worth the ruined dry-clean-only clothes.   
  
Virginia didn’t know how long she stood there recklessly splashing water on her face, only that she had to keep doing it. Each splash brought a modicum of relief that eventually amounted to a point where she could stand to stop and try to look at herself in the mirror. Her entire face was beet red and the area around her eyes was so puffy that she could only open them halfway. Her eyes themselves were completely bloodshot and still streaming tears down her cheeks. Her hair was a complete mess, with lank wet strands handing around her face. The chest of her shirt and blazer were soaked and stained orange with the run off from the pepper spray that had been on her face.   
  
“She’s in here.”   
  
Virginia focused beyond her own reflection in the mirror to see Tony Stark holding the door to the bathroom open. Two EMT’s squeezed in past him. If her face could have gotten any redder, it would have. It was bad enough that this had happened in the first place, but now other people were involved? Someone had called 911?   
  
She would NEVER live this down.   
  
This was going to fuel office gossip for months, if not the rest of the year. She would forever be known as the woman who got pepper sprayed by Tony Stark. (The office gossip mill clearly wouldn’t care that it wasn’t actually Tony that had done the pepper spraying.) Virginia wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and die as the EMTs examined her. They had her apply baby shampoo directly from the bottle onto her face and eyes and then rinse that off thoroughly. Once she had dried her face off with a towel that they provided, she was advised to let her face air dry because of something to do with the crystals in the spray. She hadn’t been paying too close attention to anything other than her absolutely abject mortification that she had been pepper sprayed by Tony Stark’s personal bodyguard. When the EMTs also advised her to go home and change her clothes, Tony promptly gave her the rest of the day off.   
  
Virginia insisted on driving herself home.   
  
When she got there, she promptly burst into tears, which only made her eyes sting and forced her to finish her crying in the shower. Once changed into her most comfortable pair of pajamas, she ordered in a pizza for lunch and spent the afternoon drinking an entire bottle of wine by herself and watching daytime soap operas. She called out of work the next day, just the thought of the questions and sniggering behind her back making her hide under her covers. This gave her the weekend to recover as well but at the same time, made going into work on Monday that much harder.   
  
Walking into work on Monday, she tried her hardest not to overhear any bits of conversation or to make eye contact with anyone. She kept her eyes on a point on the floor about three feet in front of her as she walked, and focused on the sound of her heels clicking against the floor. So it was quite the shock when she got to her desk and finally allowed her eyes to look at something other than the floor to find two large arrangements of flowers.   
  
One was a riot of colors and all of them were roses. Pink, purple, white, orange, red, every color that a rose could come in was there. There had to be at least 7 or 8 dozen of them, maybe more, perfectly arranged to be almost globe-like. The other arrangement appeared to be every other flower but roses. Lilies and carnations and baby’s breath and daisies and tulips and a host of other flowers Virginia didn’t know the names to. Between the two arrangements, her desk was practically covered with flowers. She searched through the roses for a note and found a blocky, handwritten note.   
  
Sorry for what Happy did. He can be a little over-eager sometimes. No hard feelings? --Tony   
  
She had no idea why Mr. Stark felt like he had to apologize. He wasn’t the one who pepper sprayed her. And if the roses were from him, that meant the other bouquet had to be from “Happy” Hogan. Her suspicions were confirmed when she found the note in the other bouquet.  
  
I’M SO SORRY!! Please accept my sincerest, utmost apologies. I’m really really sorry. --Harold Hogan   
  
Just as she finished reading the second note, the phone on her desk rang. “Stark Industries, Accounts Receivable, this is Virginia Potts speaking, how can I help you?”   
  
“Do you really answer the phone like that every time?”   
  
Virginia blinked. “I’m—I’m sorry?”   
  
“Do you have to say all that every time you answer the phone? That’s not policy is it? Please tell me that’s just something you do and not something that every employee of my company has to do.”   
  
“Mr. Stark?”   
  
“Correctamundo! Do you have a minute? Come upstairs, Happy’s grabbing us some coffee and doughnuts right now and we can have a chat.”   
  
“Uh, yes, I’ll be right there.” She hung up the phone.   
  
She stared at her hand that was resting on the phone in it’s cradle and felt a pit of dread widening in her stomach. This was it, she was fired. And Tony Stark had deigned to do it himself for some reason. Or maybe he had to due to some legal liability from getting pepper sprayed? Oh god, they didn’t think she actually tried to assault him? They being Legal, HR or whoever was in charge of these kinds of workplace incidents? Virginia took a deep, cleansing breath, tamped down on her fear and set out for the elevators that would take her back up to the scene of the crime.   
  
Of course, this time when she entered into the waiting area just outside of Tony Stark’s office, she was immediately confronted with an incredibly contrite Harold “Happy” Hogan who spent at least 20 minutes explaining his version of events, detailing just how bad he felt and pleading for her forgiveness. Which she readily gave to him, but he didn’t seem satisfied with it until he had asked for it four more times.   
  
Finally, Tony stuck his head out of the door to his office. “Pepper Spray gets it Hap, you’re real sorry. Leave her alone before she files a restraining order.”   
  
She left Happy with a final polite smile before following Tony Stark into his office. It was a beautiful space, with the far wall being entirely made of glass and offering a stunning view of the Stark Industries campus and the surrounding areas. Most of the furniture in it was either glass and chrome or leather and chrome. All very sleek and minimalist in design.   
  
It was obvious he didn’t spend a lot of time in here.  
  
He took his seat behind his desk and motioned for her to sit in one of the chairs opposite of him. He put his feet up on the desk and folded his hands across his trim stomach. “Glad to see you made it in today.”  
  
Virginia felt a blush instantly spring to life across her cheeks and nose and then chastised herself for it. She had plenty of personal days saved up and was entitled to use them at any time. She opened her mouth to speak, but Tony had already moved on, waving a dismissive hand at her. “Don’t worry about it. I would have taken the next day off too. Hell, I would have used it as an excuse to take the whole week off.”   
  
Virginia smiled, not sure where this conversation was going. This didn’t seem like the conversation they would be having if she was going to be fired. If she was, there definitely should have been someone from Human Resources present as well.   
  
“So, Virginia “Pepper Spray” Potts. …Can I just call you Pepper?"  
  
 _If it means I’m not fired, you can call me whatever you want._ Wisely, Virginia kept that thought to herself and instead simply answered “sure.”   
  
“Great. Pepper. Pepper Pots. Just rolls off the tongue. Anyway: what are you doing down in finance?”   
  
“I’m sorry? I don’t understand the question.”   
  
Tony picked up a piece of paper from his desk and began reading from it. “Virginia Potts, originally from Battle Creek, Michigan, graduated from University of Michigan Ann Arbor _magna cum laude_ with a degree in accounting and a minor in math. Worked at A.I.M. for a year and a half. Then got an MBA from UCLA, winning the J. Fred Weston award for academic excellence in finance. Yet you’re pushing papers in a cubicle down on the 5th floor. Why aren’t you running some hedge fund or whatever it is you MBA types do?”

“Is this an interview?”   
  
“No!" Tony looked as if he was offended at the very thought of being associated with something so business-like. “I’m just trying to figure out how a junior financial accountant was able to spot an error that most banks wouldn’t catch in an audit.”   
  
Virginia thought a moment, weighing honesty vs decorum. If she was honest, he might not like what he heard, given his womanizing ways. Decorum called for her to put such a thick layer of sugar-coating over her real answer that it would be hard to tell it was even there. And while Tony Stark was a terrible womanizer, he was also incredibly smart with zero tolerance for smoke being blown up his ass. “Honestly? It’s because I’m 26 and female in a field that’s dominated by men. I have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition. If I screw up even once, I’m immediately dismissed as incompetent. If this mistake was found later and it was found that it had passed through my hands and I hadn’t caught it, it would have irrevocably set back my career goals. Maybe even fired.”   
  
Tony gazed at her in a way that could only be described as ‘assessing’. She returned his gaze evenly, but inside was dying to know just where exactly this was going. Why did he have a print out of her resume, how much had those flower arrangements cost, and if this was a firing, where was the HR rep?   
  
Tony sat forward, feet on the ground and hands folded on the desk in front of him. “How would you like to be my personal assistant?”   
  
She felt her eyebrows shoot up on her forehead and her mouth drop open before she could stop herself. “Are you serious?”   
  
“As a heart attack. You’d be great at it. You’d help me out with the more mundane business things, which means I get to spend more time doing the things I want to do. It’s a win-win.”   
  
“…No offense Mr. Stark, but I’m not sure I see the win in it for me.”  
  
“Well for starters, I’ll quadruple your current pay.”   
  
_Quad…quadruple?_ She could pay off her grad school loans in…..well, a hell of a lot faster. And she could get a bigger apartment. And maybe she could finally own her own pair of Louboutins. Maybe even two. Or three.   
  
“Then there’s the world travel, since I’d expect you travel with me on business trips. In the past three months I’ve been to Tokyo, Berlin and Sydney. And then there’s the whole surrogate thing, when you fill in for me when I’m not able to be in two places at once, so you can avoid scraping and clawing your way up the corporate ladder. Your word would go pretty far when it would be equivalent to mine. …I can keep going if you need me to.”   
  
Personal assistant to Tony Stark. Helping him to run Stark Industries, one of the leading weapons manufacturers in the world. She could make a lot…A LOT of connections in that kind of position. Which might make putting up with Tony Stark and all the trappings of his lifestyle worth it.   
  
“Full disclosure though, I’ve gone through 4 PA’s in the last month alone and none of them made it more than 3 days.”   
  
If she did this, it was going to be challenging. Maybe even the biggest professional challenge she had ever taken on. Just last summer he had a sex tape leaked to Entertainment Tonight. The last time he attended the Oscars, he got incredibly drunk and mooned everyone on the red carpet. He was regularly late to press conferences and was flippantly honest about whether he thought a reporter’s question was stupid. But if she managed to survive being his Personal Assistant, it would have the potential to benefit her career greatly. She might even make C-Suite a few years ahead of schedule.   
  
“I accept.”   
  
“Really?” Tony seemed surprised. “Because I had this whole thing about how you could probably meet some movie stars too, like Brad Pitt.”   
  
“I’m more of a George Clooney girl myself.” Something…. sparked between them just then. It made a flush spring to her face in a way that she knew made her freckles stand out. It was alluring and electric and exhilarating and Virginia suddenly understood how a moth near a lamp felt.   
  
Tony smirked and it hit her like a punch in the gut. “Like ‘em tall dark and handsome, huh?”   
  
“I’m not sure that’s an appropriate conversation for a supervisor and a direct reportee to be having at work.”   
  
“Brilliant! Look, you’re doing it already. Reigning me in, setting boundaries. I knew you’d be fantastic at this. Oh, Obie’s gonna be so pleased he’ll probably piss himself.”   
  
Oh, right. Obadiah Stane, the man who took over Stark Industries in the wake of Howard and Maria Stark’s deaths. An absolute titan of industry and a bit of a celebrity in his own right. Someone who she would probably be rubbing elbows with pretty regularly. This was going to be her life now.   
  
“Happy! Bring in the coffee and celebratory doughnuts! Pepper here is gonna be my new PA!”


End file.
